This past Friday, March 24, an elementary/middle school friend hosted a class of 2019 reunion. One by one, we all walked into the familiar backyard decked out in our potential college apparel. We greeted each other with smiles, laughed at our middle school jokes (which are still as funny as they were five years ago), and hollered when our former classmates would come in four feet taller with a beard and all.

In those moments surrounded by some people I still see daily and others I have barely seen since we graduated middle school, it truly feels like nothing has changed. The mini-reunions we’ve managed to have nearly every year of high school transport me back to the quaint, eccentric school that is St. Mark’s Lutheran that I once called home.

Surrounded by all those childhood friends, crushes, enemies, frenemies, and everything in between, I found myself reverting back to my eighth-grade self. My lisp thickens, my voice gets louder, and I start becoming a jokester. Once all three of those things happen, I KNOW that I’m allowing my 18-year-old stresses to go away and re-welcoming my awkward, middle school, brace-face self with perfectly curled hair back into my soul. And, that feels like pure bliss.

Host of the reunion, my friend since around third grade, and current Servite senior Andrew Cagney gave his take on reuniting with childhood friends: “It’s nice to catch up with old friends and see what’s new. It’s fun to see how much people from the past change physically. It’s important because it reminds you of the people you can always talk to besides your immediate friend group.”

Andrew couldn’t have put it any better. At our K-8 school, no matter what group you were in, you always seemed to have a friend somewhere, someone to confide in, and someone to laugh with. For me, I’ve found that high school can sometimes feel cold and isolated, but middle school serves as a reminder that there are always going to be people that you feel at home with—even if you might only talk to them once in a blue moon.